DORCHESTER (continued)
Henchard’shouse—“one of the best, faced with dull red-and-grey old brick,” there are many such here—was in the neighbourhood of North Street, and not far from that Corn Exchange where Bathsheba was wont, on market days, to mingle with the burly farmers and corn-factors, like a yacht among ironclads, displaying for inspection the sample wheat in her outstretched palm.
Down here, too, is the gaol, whose mass is seen from the meads on approaching the town. It has been much altered, but the heavy stone gateway, together with the flanking walls of red brick, is very much as of old. Happily, such things as are noticed in that gruesome short story,The Withered Arm, are things only of dreadful memory. At that time the populace of Dorchester were accustomed to wait below in the meadows, eager to witness the executioner, the criminals—murderers, burglars, rick-firers, sheep and horse-stealers, even down to those convicted of petty larceny—being capitally condemned and hanged as high as, possibly indeed higher than, Haman, whose place of suspension is notoriously and traditionally lofty. Gertrude Lodge, coming here for the cure of her withered arm bythe agency of the dead man’s touch, observed, as all could then not help observing, those “three rectangular lines against the sky,” which indicated the coming execution and the morrow’s exhibition, to be followed by the merry-makings of Hang Fair. When she enquired the hour of execution, she was told: “The same as usual—twelve o’clock, or as soon after as the London mail-coach gets in. We always wait for that, in case of a reprieve.”
Dorchester Gaol
In Dorchester Gaol—we have no space here for those merely actual persons of flesh and blood who have been incarcerated, or who have suffered in it—those more real characters of fiction, Boldwood and Marston were confined; and hence the Shottsford watchmaker ofThe Three Strangers, lying under sentence of death, escaped along the downs to Higher Crowstairs, where, while sheltering in theingle-nook of the cottage, two other strangers, one of them the hangman deputed to execute the demands of the law upon him on the morrow, take shelter from the weather.
To follow this gloomy train a little longer, the veritable Hangman’s Cottage, home of this erstwhile busy functionary, at a time when Dorchester demanded the whole time and energies of a Jack Ketch, and not a very occasional visit from one common to the whole kingdom, may be seen, at the foot of Glydepath Lane, in a fine damp situation near the river. It is one of a tiny group of heavily thatched old rustic cottages built of grouted flint and chalk, faced and patched with red brick, and held together with iron ties, so that in their old age they shall not, some night, altogether collapse and deposit their inhabitants among the potatoes, the peas, and cabbages of their fertile gardens. Dorchester paid its hangman a regular salary, and in the intervals between his more important business, he was under engagement to perform those minor punishments of whipping and scourging, of putting in the stocks, and of pillorying, by whose plentiful administration Old England was made the “Merry England” of our forefathers. Let not the reader, however, seek a covert satire here. It is not to be gainsaid that it was a “Merry England,” for the times were so brutal that, in all such degrading and pitiful spectacles as these, the populace took the keenest delight. Sufficient for the day—! and those who made merry did not stop to consider that they who were now spectators might soon very likely afford in their own persons the same spectacle.
Miserable times! Proof of them, do you needseek it, is to be found in the Dorchester Museum, where the leaden weights, boldly inscribed “MERCY,” are pointed out as the contribution, years ago, of an exceptionally tender-hearted governor of the gaol to a more pitiful method of ending the condemned man who was to die for his crime of arson.
The Hangman’s Cottage, Dorchester
The man was of unusually light weight, and, as those were the times when men really were slowly and painfully hanged and choked by degrees, before criminals were given a drop and their necks broken, it was thought a kindly thing on the part of this governor that heshould have provided these heavy weights, to attach to this particular victim’s feet and so help to shorten his misery.
This museum it was that Lucetta, keen to get the girl out of the way, suggested for Elizabeth Jane’s entertainment; with affected enthusiasm and a good deal of veiled womanly sarcasm at the expense of antiquities, describing how it contained “crowds of interesting things—skeletons, teeth, old pots and pans, ancient boots and shoes, birds’ eggs—all charmingly instructive.”
But enough of such things, let us to other quarters.
Looking on to the cheerful and prosperous South Street from the corner of Durngate Street is the substantial “grey façade” of Lucetta’s house, where lived Henchard’s lady-love, whose affections were so readily transferable. The lower portion of this, the “High Place Hall” of the story, has suffered a transformation into business premises, but the resounding alleyways of Durngate Street and neighbouring lanes are as gloomy as those spots are described. “At night the forms of passengers were patterned by the lamps in black shadows upon the pale walls,” and so they are still.
But the description of Lucetta’s house in those pages is a composite picture; a good deal of it deriving from an old mansion in another part of the town. This will be found by taking a narrow thoroughfare leading out of the north side of High West Street, and called, in different parts of its course, Glydepath Lane and Glydepath Street. In this quiet byway is the early eighteenth-century mansion known as Colyton House, sometime a townresidence of the Churchill family, and so named from the little Devonshire town of Colyton, near which is situated Ash, that old dwelling, now a farmhouse, whence the historic Churchills sprang.
Readily to be seen, in a blank wall, is the long-filled-in archway, with the dreadful keystone mask, alluded to in the pages ofThe Mayor of Casterbridge.
Colyton House, Dorchester
“Originally the mask had exhibited a comic leer, as could still be discerned; but generations of Casterbridge boys had thrown stones at the mask, aiming at its open mouth; and the blows thereof had chipped off the lips and jaws as if they had been eaten away by disease.” Its appearance is indeed of a ghastly leprous nature, infinitely shuddery.
At this end of the town, out upon the Charminster road is the great Roman encampment of Poundbury, or, locally, “Pummery,” where Henchard spreadthat feast, deserted by those for whom it was intended, in favour of the rival entertainment in the West Walks, prepared by the hateful Farfrae, that paragon of all the business and higher virtues, whom the reader perversely, but not unnaturally, detests. “Roman” it has been in this last passage declared, but, in truth, its origin has been as widely disputed as that of Weatherbury Castle, where the varying theories arouse Mr. Hardy’s sarcasm so markedly. It lies without the site of the Roman walls of Durnovaria, and probably formed some advanced outpost or great camp in the long years of the Roman occupation of Britain, before the establishment of security and the growth of their towns. Those Roman walls are now for the most part gone and their sites were long ago planted with avenues, now growing aged and past their prime, and ceased to be that clean-cut barrier betweenurbsandrurethey formed of old, when Dorchester of pre-railway days had not grown too big for that girdle the Romans had set about her: a girdle not too constrictive for the needs of the Middle Age, nor even in the eighteenth century with any suspicion of tight-lacing, but all too compressive soon after the coaches had given way to trains, and steel rails and steam along them had sent up the birthrate. A notable passage inThe Mayor of Casterbridgetells how there were not, quite a little while ago, any suburbs here, in the modern sense, nor any gradual fusion of town and country. “The farmer’s boy could sit under his barleymow, and pitch a stone into the window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, whenhe condemned a sheep stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of ‘Baa,’ that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by.”
But those bounds have in several places been leaped, and, in especial where the South Walk runs, modern villas have redly replaced the golden grain or the green pastures. Changed manners and customs have brought about this alteration, quite as much as increased population. The four old traditional streets of the town, together with their more immediate offshoots, have been resigned more exclusively to business than of yore, and made less a residence. The butchers, the bakers, the candlestick-makers, who would once have scorned to live anywhere else than over “the shop,” will now not very often condescend to make their homes in the upper stages of their “stores” or “establishments,” or by what other pretty names modern finesse elects to describe shops and counters and tills and such like things by which tradespeople become rich.
And, by that same token, the business premises thus deserted for snug suburban villas, are themselves changing. One could never, in modern times, have strictly called Dorchester generally picturesque, in the prominent circumstances of those four main streets: repeated conflagrations that destroyed most of the really old and interesting houses forbade that, and replaced thatch and barge-boarded gables with plain brick fronts, severe in unornamental rectangular windows, and ending on the skyline with unimaginative straight copings. But the latest manifestations of these times, when they say business is a struggle and all trades alike carried on less for the profit of the purveyor, than for the good ofthe purchaser, are expensive carved stone and brick frontages, with good artistic features. As art in this country only spells much expenditure of good money and as building operations are always costly, it is a little difficult to square all these developments with the talk of “hard times.” South Street, in especial, is being grandly transformed, and “Napper’s Mite,” the crouching row of almshouses, built from the benefaction of the good Sir Robert Napper, in 1615, made to look additionally humble by newly risen tall buildings. But the town authorities have not yet removed the old rusticated stone obelisk that stands in Cornhill, in the centre of the town, where High East and High West Streets, and North and South Streets meet. It serves the multum-in-parvo purposes of a pump, a lamp-standard, and a leaning-stock for Dorchester’s weary or born-tired, and is moreover a landmark. But the two dumpy little houses at the corner, which were properly dumpy and humble and—so to speak—knew their place, and abased themselves in the presence of their betters—that is to say, in the contiguity of St. Peter’s across the road—have been rebuilt, with the result that their tall upstanding pretentiousness detracts not a little from the height of that “grizzled tower.”
And so, turning to the left at this corner, we leave Dorchester for Bridport, along High West Street, the quietest of all these thoroughfares, and looking rather “out of it,” and somewhat glad of that fact, in a dignified, exclusive way, typified by its aristocratic old houses, and its old County Hall. It is true there are a few shops in High Street, but they are by no means pushful shops. Theynever make “alarming sacrifices,” nor sell off. Indeed, were I not fearful of offending susceptibility, I might declare a belief that they never sell anything at all, and are kept by “grown-ups,” not grown tired of playing at shops when they did so arrive at years supposed to be those of discretion. Here is a quiet shop—where they will doubtless sell you something, if you really enter and firmly insist upon it—occupying one of the few really old and picturesque houses in the main thoroughfare; it is the house “by tradition” occupied by the infamous Judge Jeffreys, when visiting Dorchester on the business of that special occasion, the Bloody Assize, holden to try the unhappy wretches arraigned for their part in Monmouth’s Rebellion of 1685. The old house bears an inscription to this effect. Over three hundred prisoners faced the judge at that awful time, and two hundred and ninety received sentence of death. Of these the number actually executed was seventy-four, and, as the old gossip at the “Three Mariners” tells, portions of their bodies were gibbeted in various parts of the county, “different j’ints sent about the country like butcher’s meat.”
And so we leave Dorchester and its, on the whole, grim memories, along an avenue, fellow to that by which the town was entered.
SWANAGE
Thename of Swanage shares with that of Swansea, the honour of being, perhaps, the most poetic that any seaside resort ever owned. It is a corruption of the Danish name of “Swanic,” or “Swanwich,” and there seems to be no reason to doubt—although there exists a school of antiquarians sceptical enough to doubt it—that the place was then, as its name indicates, a place of swans. Your modern antiquary, disgusted at the childish legends once everywhere accepted as sober historical facts, rushes to the other extreme, and, although a thing be obvious, will not allow its obviousness, unless supported by documentary or other tangible evidence. He must needs disregard the self-evident, and delve deeply and unavailingly in attempts to prove that “things are not what they seem.”
Conjectures that there was at that time a royal swannery here are based upon the known fondness of royal personages for preserving that bird, once thought a table delicacy, and upon the existence from ancient times of the famous Abbotsbury swannery, along this same coast. But it is needless here to labour the point; and although the little stream, more and more pollutedly with every yearof the extension of modern Swanage, still flows down into the sea under the name of the Swan Brook, the argument supported by it in favour of the obvious origin of the place-name shall be no further pursued.
But the surrounding quarries have for many centuries past given a very different character to Swanage than that of a village with a marshy creek inhabited by swans. Few places ever proclaimed the industries by which they lived more prominently than did this little port, until well within recent recollection. A colliery town no more insistently obtrudes the circumstances by which it earns its livelihood than Swanage displayed evidences of its cleanly trade and craft of stone-working and stone-exporting.
The varieties of stone from the quarries to the rear of Swanage are among the most famous building and decorative stones in the world; for here we are at the gates of Isle of Purbeck, where, not only the oolitic limestone of the same nature as “Portland stone” is quarried, but that (to antiquaries at least) far more generally known material, “Purbeck marble,” as well. No ancient church or cathedral of any considerable size or elaboration was considered complete without shafts and font and other decorative features of Purbeck marble, sometimes polished, at other times left in its native state; and thus, from very early times until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when more strikingly coloured and patterned foreign marbles began to find their way into England, Swanage in particular, and Purbeck in general, enjoyed an amazing prosperity.
Swanage in Mr. Hardy’s pages is “Knollsea,” and is described inThe Hand of Ethelbertaas a village:—“Knollsea,” we learn, “was a seaside village lying snug within two headlands, as between a finger and thumb.” A very true simile, as a glance on the map, upon the configuration of Swanage Bay, will satisfy those curious in the exactness or otherwise of literary images. But time has very rapidly vitiated the justness of what follows:—“Everybody in the parish who was not a boatman was a quarrier, unless he were the gentleman who owned half the property and had been a quarryman, or the other gentleman who owned the other half and had been to sea.”
“The knowledge of the inhabitants was of the same special sort as their pursuits. The quarrymen in white fustian understood practical geology, the laws and accidents of dips, faults, and cleavage, far better than the ways of the world and mammon; the seafaring men, in Guernsey frocks, had a clearer notion of Alexandria, Constantinople, the Cape, and the Indies than of any inland town in their own country. This, for them, consisted of a busy portion, the Channel, where they lived and laboured, and a dull portion, the vague unexplored miles of interior at the back of the ports, which they seldom thought of.”
This charming picture of an out-of-the world place remained, very little blurred by change, until well on into the ’80’s of the nineteenth century, when it occurred to exploiting railway folk that the time was ripe for the construction of a branch railway from Wareham. With the opening of that line the primitive houses, and the equallyprimitive people who lived in them, suffered a change almost as sudden and complete as though a harlequin had waved his wand over their heads.
There was indeed something exceptionally primitive in the Swanage people. They were chiefly quarrymen, and like all quarry folk, mining the great blocks of stone from mother earth, a strangely reserved and isolated race. A man who, felling timber, might conceivably remain all his life mentally detached from his occupation, following it only mechanically, could not long in these quarries, rich in the embalmed stoniness of myriads of humble creatures living in the palæozoic age, remain unaffected by his surroundings. An imaginative man might, not inaptly, conceive himself as a phenomenally gigantic giant working in some vast petrified graveyard among the petrifactions of a world infinitely little; and, as the dyer’s hand is subdued to the dye he works in, and—a less classic allusion—as the photographer acquires a permanent stain from his collodion, he could scarce escape the almost inevitable mental twist resulting from the surroundings.
And as they were, and in some measure still are, individually peculiar, so collectively they retain their exclusiveness. Still, with every recurrent Shrove Tuesday, their guild meets at Corfe, under the presidency of warden and steward; and even in these days it is not open for an outsider to become a Purbeck quarryman. It is an industry only to be followed by patrimony and by due admission into its membership in the prescribed manner, which is that of appearing at the annual court with a penny loaf in one hand, a pot of beer in the other, and asum of six shillings and eightpence in the pocket, ready to be duly paid down.
With all the changes that have overtaken Swanage, who knows nowadays, save very old folk, that Swanage people are, or were, locally “Swanage Turks”? When—outside Swanage, of course—you asked why so named, you were apt to be told “Tarks, we al’us carls ’em, ’cos they don’t know nawthen about anything.” The informant in this particular instance was a Poole man. None could possibly have brought this charge of comprehensive and thorough-going ignorance against the natives of Poole, for that ancient port was a sink of iniquity, and inhabited, if we are to believe the history books—which there is no reason we should not do—by ruffians who were by no means unspotted of the world, but had plumbed the depths of every wickedness. Since Swanage has become the terminus of a branch railway and become a seaside resort, its “Turks” have acquired a very considerable amount of worldly wisdom, and can argue and chop logic with you, as well as the best.
To those who knew and loved old Swanage, the change that has come with its tardy accessibility by rail is woeful, but to those who have not so known and loved, I daresay it seems, by contrast with Bournemouth, a place strangely undeveloped. The trouble with the first-named is that development has been all too rapid, and has utterly robbed Swanage of its immemorial character as the port whence the famous Purbeck stone was shipped. Alas! pretentious houses of a tall and terrible ugliness now stand in the middle of the bay, on the shore immediately in front of what used merely bycourtesy to be called “the town,” but is now actually grown to that status. The “bankers”—rows upon rows of stacked slabs of Purbeck stone that used to form so striking a feature of the shore, and were wont, to a stranger seeing them first on a moonlit night, to look so grisly, as though this were some close-packed seashore cemetery—the circumstance of facetious irony—the grown prosperity of Swanage has built banks, where the Swanage tradesfolk doubtless deposit heavily from the profits of their summer trading.
The Old Church, Swanage
In the distance, along the curving shore of Swanage Bay, there has arisen with the development of the Durlstone estate, a grand hotel, and in thetown itself—the folly of it!—uninteresting modern commercial buildings have replaced the quaint old cottages that, built as they were, in a peculiarly local fashion, with great stone slabs and rude stone tiling, had their like nowhere else. Now, the rows of newly arisen streets are such as have their counterparts in every town, and you can dineà la carteortable-d’hôteat the many hotels and boarding-houses, as their announcements boldly inform the visitor, quite as elaborately as in great cities. All, without doubt, very refined and up to date, but perhaps not to all of us, who keep the simple and robustious appetites of our beginnings, so pleasing a change from the time (of which Kingsley speaks) when a simple glass of ale and a crust of bread and cheese at a rustic inn was all one wished, and certainly all one could have got.
Of those times there are but little “islands,” so to speak, left in the surging mass of modern brick and stone. One of them is the ancient church, whose tower is thought to be Saxon—the church where Ethelberta Petherwin, inThe Hand of Ethelberta, marries Lord Mountclere. Another, tucked away behind the Town Hall, and only to be with some difficulty discovered, is the old village lock-up. No dread Bastille this, but an affair resembling a stone tool-house, twelve feet by eight, and lighted only by the holes in the decaying woodwork of its nail-studded door. It was built in 1803, “erected” as the old inscription tells us, “for the prevention of Wickedness and Vice by the Friends of Religion and Good Order.” The inference to be drawn from the small size of this place of incarceration is that the “Wickedness and Vice” of Swanage wereon a very insignificant scale. Although Swanage has grown so greatly, and now owns a very fine and large police-station, it is not to be inferred that the delinquencies have increased in proportion, but rather that officialism has made a larger growth, and that Swanage, like poor old England in general, is over-governed.
Among other outstanding features of Swanage, conferred upon it by the late Mr. Mowlem, of the London contracting firm of Mowlem and Burt, is the Wellington Clock Tower, the Gothic pinnacled structure now ornamenting the foreshore, in what were once the private gardens of “the Grove.” But “the Grove” has now, like many another seashore estate, been cut up, and new villas now take the place of the older exclusiveness.
The Clock Tower, one of the many memorials to the great Duke of Wellington, stood, until about 1860, on the south side of London Bridge, but was removed when the roadway was widened at that point. Once removed, the good folk of Southwark were at a loss what to do with it, and so solved their difficulty by presenting its stones to Mr. Mowlem, the contractor. They thought he had been saddled with a “white elephant,” and chuckled accordingly; but they little knew their man. He considered the relic “just the thing” for his native town of Swanage, and accepting it with the greatest alacrity, despatched it hither, and presented it to his friend Mr. Docwra, of “the Grove.” This poor old monument to martial glory has suffered of late, for its pinnacle has been blown down and replaced by a copper sheathing very like a dish-cover.
SWANAGE TO CORFE CASTLE
Thatpilgrim who, whether on foot or by cycle, shall elect to trace these landmarks, will find the road out of Swanage to Corfe, by way of Langton Matravers and Kingston a heart-breaking stretch of stony hills, whose blinding glare under a summer sun is provocative of ophthalmia, and whose severities of stone walling, in place of green hedges, recall the scenery of Ireland. Herston, too, the unlovely outskirt of Swanage, is not encouraging. But the world—it is a truism—is made up of all sorts, and here, as elsewhere, rewards come after trials.
Langton Matravers, on the ridge-road, is, just as one might suppose from the stony nature of Purbeck, a village of stone houses, and very grim and unornamental ones too. Nine hundred souls live here, and so long as the “Langton freestone” won from its quarries is in good demand, are happy enough, although subject to every extremity of weather. The “Matravers” in the place-name derives from the old manorial lords, the Maltravers family, who dropped the “l” out of their name some time after one of their race, deeply implicated in the barbarous murder of Edward II., proved himself a very “bad Travers” indeed, and so made his name peculiarly descriptive.
Passing Gallows Gore Cottages—what a melodramatic address to own!—we come to Kingston village, along just such a road, with just such a view as that described inThe Hand of Ethelberta, although, to be sure, she went, on that donkey-ride to Corfe, by another and very roundabout route, through Ulwell Gap, over Nine Barrow Down. Ordinary folk would have gone by the ordinary road; but then, you see, Ethelberta was a poetess, and “unconventionality—almost eccentricity—wasde rigueur” for such an one. Hence also that unconventional, and uncomfortable, seat on the donkey’s back.
From this point Corfe Castle is exquisitely seen, down below the ridge, but situated on the course of the minor, but still mighty, backbone that bisects the Isle. From hence, too, the country may be seen spread out like a map, “domains behind domains, parishes by the score, harbours, fir-woods and little inland seas mixing curiously together.” Dipping down out of sight of all these distant Lands of Promise, among the richly wooded lanes of Kingston, the glaring limestone road is exchanged for shaded ways, where sunlight only filters through in patches of gold, looking to the imaginative as though some giant had come this way and dropped the contents of his money-bags. Thatched cottages, tall elms, and old-fashioned roadside gardens are the features of Kingston; but above all these, geographically and in every other respect, is the great and magnificent modern church built for Lord Eldon and completed in 1880, after seven years’ work and a vast amount of money had been expended upon it. It was designed by Street—that same “obliterator of historic records”—who at FawleyMagna earned Mr. Hardy’s satire; but here were no records to obliterate. Certain reminiscences of the architect’s early studies of the early Gothic of the Rhine churches may be traced here, in the exterior design of the apsidal chancel, strongly resembling that of Fawley, but one would hesitate to apply the opprobrious term of “German-Gothic” to this, as a whole. Its intention is Early English, but the general effect is rather of a Norman spirit informed with Early English details; an effect greatly accentuated by the heaviness and bulk of the central tower, intended by Lord Eldon to be a prominent landmark, and fulfilling that intention by the sacrifice of proportion to the rest of the building. Cruciform plan, size, and general elaboration render this a church particularly unfitted for so small and so rustic a village. Had its needs been studied, rather than the ecclesiological tastes of the third Lord Eldon, the little church built many years ago for the first earl, the great lawyer-lord, by Repton, would have sufficed; although to be sure it has all the faults of the first attempts at reviving Gothic.
The Earl of Eldon purchased the manor of Kingston and the residence of Encombe from William Morton Pitt in 1807. Here, in that little church built by him, he lies, beside his “Bessie,” that Bessie Surtees with whom he, then plain and penniless John Scott, eloped from the old house on Sandhill, Newcastle-on-Tyne, in 1772. His house of Encombe, the “Enkworth Court,” ofThe Hand of Ethelberta, lies deep down in the glen of Encombe, approached by a long road gradually descending into the cup-like crater by the only expedient ofwinding round it. Think of all the beautiful road scenery you have ever seen or heard of, and you will not have seen or been told of anything more beautiful in its especial kind of beauty than this sequestered road down into Lord Eldon’s retreat.Jagged white cliffs here and there project themselves out of the steep banks of grass and moss above the way, draped with a profusion of small-leaved ground-ivy and a wealth of hart’s-tongue ferns, and trees romantically shade the whole. An obelisk erected by the great statesman, on a bold bluff, to the memory of his brother, Lord Stowell, adds an element of romance to the scene, and then, plunging into a final mass of tangled woodland, the grey stone elevation of the house is seen, ghostlike, fronting a gravel drive, in its silence and drawn blinds looking less like the home of some fairy princess than the residence of a misanthrope, who has retired beyond the reach of the world and drawn his blinds, with the hope of persuading any who may possibly find their way here that he is not at home.
Encombe
“Enkworth Court” was, we are told, “a house in which Pugin would have torn his hair,” and Encombe certainly can possess no charms for amateurs of Gothic. Nor can it possibly delight students of the ancient Greek and Roman orders, for its architecture has classic intentions without being classical, and heaviness without dignity. But its interior, if it likewise does not appeal to a cultivated taste in matters connected with the mother of all the arts, is exceptionally comfortable. Here the old Chancellor, over eighty years of age, spent most of his declining days. “His sporting days were over; he had but little interest in gardening or farming; and his only reading, beside the newspaper, was a chapter in the Bible. His mornings he spent in an elbow-chair by the fireside in his study—called his shop—which was ornamentedby portraits of his deceased master, George III. and his living companion, Pincher, a poodle dog.”
From Kingston to Corfe Castle, the bourne of innumerable summer visitors, is two miles. The first glimpse of town and castle is one which clearly shows how aptly the site of them obtained its original name of Corvesgate, from the Anglo-Saxonceorfan, to cut. The site was so named long before castle or town were erected here, and referred to the passages cut or carved through the bold range of hills by the little river Corfe and its tributaries. Those clefts are clearly distinguished from here and from the main road between Corfe and Swanage, and are notched twice, so deeply into the stony range, that the eminence on which the castle stands is less like a part of one continuous chain of hills than an isolated conical hill neighboured by lengthy ridges.
On that islanded hill, shouldered by taller neighbours, the castle was built, because at this point it so effectually guarded these passes from the shores of Purbeck to the inland regions. The position in these days seems a singular one, for from the upper slopes of those neighbours it is possible to look down into the castle and observe its every detail, but such things mattered little in days before artillery.
A first impression of Corfe, if it be summer, is an impression of dazzling whiteness; resolved, on a nearer approach, into the pure white of the road and of the occasional repairs and restorations of the stone-built streets, the grey white of buildings past their first novelty, and the dead greyness of the roofing slabs of stone. There is little colour in Corfe when June has gone. The golden-greenlichens and houseleeks of spring have been sucked dry by the summer heats and turned to withered rustiness, and even the grass of the pyramidical hill on which the castle keep is reared has little more than an exhausted sage-green hue.
“Corvsgate Castle,” as we find it styled inThe Hand of Ethelberta, is frequently the scene, at such a time of year, of meetings like that of the “Imperial Association” in that story. All that is to be known respecting these ruins, “the meagre stumps remaining from flourishing bygone centuries,” is the common property of all interested in historical antiquities, but there is something, it may be supposed, in revisiting the oft-visited and in retelling the old tale, which bids defiance toennuiand precludes satiety, even although the President’s address be a paraphrase of the last archæological paper, and that the echo of its predecessor, and so forth, in endlessdiminuendo:
And smaller fleas have lesser fleas,And soad infinitum.
And smaller fleas have lesser fleas,And soad infinitum.
“Carfe,” as any Wessex man of the soil will name it, just as horses are ‘harses’ and hornets become ‘harnets’ in his ancient and untutored pronunciation, is, as already hinted, a place of stone buildings, where brick, although not unknown, is remarkable. Stone from foundation to roof, and stone slabs of immense size for the roofs themselves. In a place where building-stone is and has been so readily found it is, of course, in the nature of things to find the remains of a castle that must have been exceptionally large and strong, and herethey are, peering over the rooftops of the town from whatever point of view you choose. The castle is as essential a feature in all views of the town as it is in history; and rightly too, for had it not been for that fortress there would have been no town. It is a town by courtesy and ancient estate, and a village by size; a village that does not grow and has so far escaped the desecration of modern streets. The market cross, recently restored to perfection from a shattered stump, and the town hall both declare it to have been a town, as does, or did, the existence of a mayor, but such things have long become vanities. The return of two members to Parliament, a privilege Corfe enjoyed until reform put an end to it in 1832, proved nothing, for Parliamentary representation was no more fixed on the principle of comparative electorates than the representation of Ireland is now in the House of Commons.
Corfe Castle
The temperance interest need by no means be shocked when it is said that the most interesting feature of Corfe, next to the castle, is its inn. The church does not count; for the body of it has been uninterestingly rebuilt, and only the fine tower, of Perpendicular date, remains. The inns, however, combine picturesqueness with the solid British comforts of old times and the less substantial amenities of the new. Here, looking upon the “Bankes Arms,” with its highly elaborate heraldic sign, you can have no manner of doubt as to what family is still paramount in Corfe, and I think, perhaps, that to shelter behind so gorgeous an achievement even reflects a halo upon the guest; while if the “Greyhound” can confer no such satisfaction, its unusual picturesqueness,with that charming feature of a porch projecting over the pavement and owning a capacious room poised above the comings and goings, the commerce and gossipings of the people, can at least give a visitor the charm of what, although an ancient feature of the place, is at least a novelty to him.
The three cylindrical stone columns of plethoric figure which support this porch and its room are more generally useful than the architect who placed them here, some two hundred and eighty years ago, probably ever imagined they would be.Hedevised them for the support of his gazebo above, but more than twenty generations of Wessex folk have found them convenient for leaning-stocks, and the comfortable support they give has further lengthened many a long argument which, had all contributing parties stood supported only by their own two natural posts that carry the bodily superstructure, would have been earlier concluded. The progress of an argument, discussion, narration, or negotiation under such unequal conditions is to be watched with interest. Time probably will forbid one being followed from beginning to end; but to be a spectator of one of these comedies from the middle onwards is sufficient. The length it has already been played may generally be pretty accurately estimated by the state of weariness or impatience exhibited by that party to it who is not supported by the pillar. The “well, as I was saying” of the one enjoying the leaning-stock, discloses, like the parson’s “secondly, Dear brethren,” the fact that the discourse is well on the way, but the same thing may be gathered by those outof earshot, in the manœuvres of the less fortunate of the two, the one who is supporting his own bulk. He stands upright, hands behind his back, while swaying his walking stick; then he leans his weight to one side upon it, first (if he be a stout man, whom it behoves to exercise caution) carefully selecting a safe crevice in the jointing of the pavement, as a bearing for the ferule of his ash-plant; then, growing weary of this attitude, he repeats the process on the other side, changing after a while to the expedient of a sideways stress, halfway up the body, by straining the walking stick horizontally against the wall. Then, having exhausted all possible movements, he takes a bulky silver watch from his pocket, and affects to find time unexpectedly ahead of him; and when this resort is reached the spectacle generally comes to a conclusion.
But it is time to follow Ethelberta into the castle:—
“Ethelberta crossed the bridge over the moat, and rode under the first archway into the outer ward. As she had expected, not a soul was here. The arrow-slits, portcullis-grooves, and staircases met her eye as familiar friends, for in her childhood she had once paid a visit to the spot. Ascending the green incline and through another arch into the second ward, she still pressed on, till at last the ass was unable to clamber an inch further. Here she dismounted, and tying him to a stone which projected like a fang from a raw edge of wall, performed the remainder of the journey on foot. Once among the towers above, she became so interested in the windy corridors, mildewed dungeons, and the tribeof daws peering invidiously upon her from overhead, that she forgot the flight of time.”
“Ethelberta crossed the bridge over the moat, and rode under the first archway into the outer ward. As she had expected, not a soul was here. The arrow-slits, portcullis-grooves, and staircases met her eye as familiar friends, for in her childhood she had once paid a visit to the spot. Ascending the green incline and through another arch into the second ward, she still pressed on, till at last the ass was unable to clamber an inch further. Here she dismounted, and tying him to a stone which projected like a fang from a raw edge of wall, performed the remainder of the journey on foot. Once among the towers above, she became so interested in the windy corridors, mildewed dungeons, and the tribeof daws peering invidiously upon her from overhead, that she forgot the flight of time.”
The ruins that Ethelberta and the “Imperial Association” had come to inspect owe their heaped and toppling ruination to that last great armed convulsion in our insular history, the Civil War, whose two greatest personalities were Charles I. and Oliver Cromwell. Until that time the proud fortress had stood unharmed, as stalwart as when built in Norman times.
The history of Corfe before those times is very obscure, and no one has yet discovered whether the first recorded incident in it took place at a mere hunting-lodge here or at the gates of a fortress. That incident, the first and most atrocious of all the atrocious deeds of blood wrought at Corfe, was the murder of King Edward “the Martyr,” inA.D.978, by his stepmother, Queen Elfrida, anxious to secure the throne for her own son. The boy—he was only in his nineteenth year—had drawn rein here, on his return alone from hunting, and was drinking at the door from a goblet handed him by Elfrida herself when she stabbed him to the heart. His horse, startled at the attack, darted away, dragging the body by the stirrups, and thus, battered and lifeless, it was found.
Built, or rebuilt, in the time of the Conqueror, Corfe Castle was early besieged, and in that passage gave a good account of itself and justified its existence, for King Stephen failed to take it by force or to starve the garrison out. How long he may have been pleased to sit down before it we do not know, for the approach of a relieving forcecaused him to pack his baggage and be off. Strong, however, as it was even then, it was continually under enlargement in the reigns of Henry II., Henry III., and Edward I., and had a better right to the oft-used boast of being impregnable than most other fortresses.
CORFE CASTLE
Likesome cruel ogre of folk-lore the Castle of Corfe has drunk deep of blood. Its strength kept prisoners safely guarded, as well as foes at arm’s length, and many a despairing wretch has been hurried through the now ruined gatehouse, to the muttered “God help him!” of some compassionate warder. Through the great open Outer Ward and steeply uphill between the two gloomy circular drum-towers across the second ward, and thence to the Dungeon Tower at the further left-hand corner of the stronghold, they were taken and thrust into some vile place of little ease, to be imprisoned for a lifetime, to be starved to death, or more mercifully ended by the assassin’s dagger. Twenty-four knights captured in Brittany, in arms against King John, in aid of his nephew, Arthur, were imprisoned here, in 1202, and twenty-two of them met death by starvation in some foul underground hold. Prince Arthur, as every one knows, was blinded by orders of the ruthless king, and Arthur’s sister, Eleanor, was thrown into captivity, first here and then at Bristol, where, after forty years, she died. Thus did monarchs dispose of rivals, and those who aided them, in the “good old days,” and other monarchs,not so ferocious, or not so well able to take care of themselves, stood in danger of tasting the same fare, as in the case of Edward II. imprisoned here and murdered in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle. Sympathies go out to the unhappy captives and victims, but a knowledge of these things tells us that they would have done the same, had opportunity offered and the positions been reversed.
This stronghold held many a humbler prisoner, among them those who had offended in one or other of the easy ways of offence in this, the King’s deer-forest of Purbeck; and many others immured for mere caprice. The place must have reeked with blood and been strewn with bones like a hyæna’s lair.
Corfe Castle
So much for the domestic history of Corfe Castle. Its last great appearance in the history of the nation was during the civil wars of King and Parliament, when it justified the design of its builders, and proved the excellence of its defences by successfully withstanding two sieges; falling in the second solely by treachery. It had by that time passed through many hands, and had come at last to the Bankes family, by whom it is still owned. It was only eight years before the first siege in this war that the property had been acquired by the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir John Bankes, who purchased it from the widow of that celebrated lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, the Coke of “Coke upon Littleton.”
Corfe Castle
When the civil war broke out, Sir John Bankes, called to the King’s side at York, left his wife and children at their home of Kingston Lacy, near Wimborne Minster, whence, for security from thecovert sneers and petty annoyances offered them by the once humbly subservient townsfolk, not slow to note the trend of affairs, they removed in the autumn of 1642 to Corfe Castle, where they spent the winter unmolested.
Although they thus sought shelter here, they probably had no idea of the heights to which the tide of rebellion would rise, and could scarce have anticipated being besieged; but the Parliamentary leaders in the district had their eyes upon a fortress which, already obsolete and the subject of antiquarian curiosity, could yet be made a place of strength, as the sequel was presently to show.
The first attempt to gain possession of the castle was by a subterfuge, ingenious and plausible enough. The Mayor of Corfe had from time immemorial held a stag hunt annually, on May Day, and it was thought that, if on this occasion some additional parties of horse were to attend, and to seize the stronghold under colour of paying a visit, the thing would be done with ease. So probably it would, but for the keen feminine intuition of Lady Bankes, who closed the gates and mounted a guard upon the entrance-towers, so that when those huntsmen came and demanded surrender, scarcely in the manner of visitors, they were at once denied admission, and effectually unmasked. The revolutionary committee sitting at Poole then considered it advisable to despatch a body of sailors, who appeared before the castle, early one morning, to demand the surrender of four small dismounted pieces of cannon with which it was armed. “But,” says theMercurius Rusticus, a contemporary news-sheet, “instead of delivering them, though at the time there were butfive men in the Castle, yet these five, assisted by the maid-servants, at their ladies’ Command, mount these peeces on their carriages againe, and lading one of them they gave fire, which small Thunder so affrighted the Sea-men that they all quitted the place and ran away.”
Operations thus opened, Lady Bankes proved herself a ready and resourceful general. By beat of drum she summoned tenants and friends, who, responding to the number of fifty, garrisoned the fortress for about a week, when a scarcity of provisions, together with threatening letters, and the entreaties of their wives, to whom home and children were more than King or Parliament, or the Bankes family either, made them shamble home again. We should perhaps not be too ready to censure them. Lady Bankes, however, did not despair. A born strategist, she perceived how vitally necessary it was, above all else, to lay in a stock of provisions; and to secure them, and time for her preparations she offered in the meekest way to give up those cannon which, after all, although they made the maximum of noise effected a minimum of harm.
The enemy, pacified by this offer, removed the guns and left the castle alone for a while; thinking its defences weak enough. But it was soon thoroughly provisioned, supplied with ammunition, and garrisoned under the command of one Captain Lawrence, and when the Roundheads of Poole next turned their attention to Corfe, behold! it was bristling like a porcupine with pikes and musquetoons and all those ancient seventeenth-century engines of war, with which men were quaintly done todeath—when by some exceptional chance the marksmen earned their name and hit anybody.
The middle of June had gone before the Parliamentary forces from Poole made their appearance. They numbered between two and three hundred horse and foot, and brought two cannon, with which they played upon the castle from the neighbouring hills, with little effect. Then came an interlude, ended by the appearance, on June 23rd, of Sir Walter Erle with between five and six hundred men, to reinforce the besiegers. They brought with them a “Demy-Canon, a Culverin, and two Sacres,” and with these fired a hail of small shot down into the castle upon those heights on either hand. The results were poor to insignificance, and it was then determined to attempt a storming of the castle. This grand advance, made on June 26th, was begun by intimidating shouts that no quarter would be granted, but the garrison were so little terrified by this fighting with the mouth that, tired of waiting the enemy from the walls, they even sallied out and slaughtered some of the foremost, who were approaching cautiously under cover of strange engines named the “Sow” and the “Boar.” The besiegers then mounted a cannon on the top of the church-tower, “which,” we are told, “they, without fears of prophanation used,” and breaking the organ, used the pipes of it for shot-cases. The ammunition included, among other strange missiles, lumps of lead torn off the roof and rolled up.
All these things proving useless, a band of a hundred and fifty sailors was sent by the Earl of Warwick, with large supplies of petards andgrenadoes, and a number of scaling ladders, and then all thought the enterprise in a fair way of being ended. The sailors, nothing loth, were made drunk, the ladders were placed against the walls, and a sum of twenty pounds was offered to the first man up. With preparations so generous as these a riotous scaling-party, carrying pikes and hand-grenades, strove to mount the ladders, but were met by an avalanche of hot cinders, stones, and things still more objectionable, hoarded up by the garrison from those primitive sanitary contrivances called by antiquaries “garderobes,” against such a contingency as this. One sailor has his clothes almost burnt off his back, another’s courage is dowsed with a pail of slops, others are knocked over, bruised and battered, into the dry moat, by a hundredweight of stone heaved over the battlements, and long ladders full of escaladers, swarming up, on one another’s heels, are flung backward with tremendous crashes by prokers from arrow-slits in the bastioned walls. Soldiers under the machicolated entrance towers have had their steel morions crushed down upon their heads by heavy weights dropped upon them, and are left gasping for breath and slowly suffocating in that meat-tin kind of imprisonment; and a more than ordinarily active besieger, who has made himself exceptionally prominent, is suddenly flattened out by a heavy lump of lead. “The knocks are too hot,” as Shakespeare says, and the assailants are forced to retire, to bury their dead, to tend one another’s hurts, and those most fortunate to cleanse themselves. That same night of August 4th, Sir Walter Erle, hearing a rumour of the King’s forces approaching, hurriedly raisedthe siege and retreated upon Poole, and not until February 1646 was Corfe Castle again molested.
This time it was beset to more purpose. Lady Bankes, now a widow, for her husband had died in 1644, parted from his family, was at Corfe, vigilant, keen-eyed, loyal, and more or less strictly blockaded between Roundhead garrisons. Wareham was in their possession, Poole, as ever, a hotbed of disaffection, and Swanage watched by land and sea. A gallant deed performed at the opening of 1646 by one Cromwell, a youthful officer strangely enough, considering his name, on the Royalist side, was of no avail. He with his troops burst through the enemy’s lines at Wareham and on the way encountered the Parliamentary governor of that place, whom he captured and brought to Corfe. This was undertaken to afford Lady Bankes an opportunity of escaping, if she wished, but she fortunately refused, for on the way back the little party were captured.
The castle was then besieged by Colonel Bingham, and endured for forty-eight days the rigours of a strict investment. In the meanwhile, Lawrence, the governor, deserted and at the same time released the imprisoned governor of Wareham. Every one knew the King’s cause here and in the whole of the kingdom to be in desperate straits, and the knowledge of fighting for a losing side unnerved all. Seeing the inevitable course of events, Lieutenant-Colonel Pitman, one of the defenders’ officers, secretly opened negotiations with the enemy for the surrender, and, succeeding in persuading the new governor, who had taken the post deserted by Lawrence, that a reinforcement from Somersetshirewas expected, under that guise at dead of night admitted fifty Parliamentary troops into the keep. When morning dawned the garrison found themselves betrayed; but, commanding as they did the lives of some thirty prisoners, they were able to exact favourable terms of surrender. And then, when all the defenders marched out, kegs of gunpowder were laid in keep and curtain-towers, down in dungeons and under roofs, and the match applied. When the roar and smoke of the explosion had died away, the stern walls that for five hundred years had frowned down upon the streets of Corfe had gone up in ruin.
Not altogether destroyed, in the Biblical completeness of the fulfilled prophecies of “not one stone upon another,” concerning Nineveh, and the Cities of the Plain; for tall spires of cliff-like masonry still represent the keep and gateway, and curtain-towers remain in recognisable shapes, connected by riven jaws of masonry, so hard and so formless that they are not easily to be distinguished from the rock in which their foundations are set. Here a tower may be seen, lifted up bodily by the agency of gunpowder, and set down again at a distance, gently and as fairly plumb as it was it its original position: there another has been torn asunder, as one tears a sheet of paper, and a few steps away is another, leaning at a much more acute angle than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Everywhere, light is let into dungeons and battlements abased; floors abolished and great empty stone fireplaces on what were second, third and fourth floors turned to mouthpieces for the winds. And yet, although such havoc has been wrought, and although it is almostimpossible to identify the greater part of its chambers, Corfe Castle is still a fine and an impressive ruin. It is grand when seen from afar, and not less grand when viewed near at hand, from the ravine in which runs the road to Wareham.
WAREHAM
Thatis a straight and easy road which in four miles leads from Corfe to Wareham, and a breezy and bracing road too, across heaths quite as unspoilt as those of “Egdon,” but of a more cheerful and hopeful aspect.The Return of the Native, whose scene is laid on the heaths to the north-west, could not, with the same justness of description, have been staged upon these, and from another circumstance, quite apart from this heart-lifting breeziness, these heaths have little in common with their brooding neighbours. They are enlivened with the signs of a very ancient and long-continued industry, for where the Romans discovered and dug in the great deposits of china-clay found here the Dorsetshire labourer still digs, and runs his truckloads on crazy tramways down to the quays upon Poole Harbour at Goathorn. Fragments of Roman pottery, made from this clay, are still occasionally found here, but since that time the clay has not been turned to extensive use on the spot where it is found, but is shipped for Staffordshire and abroad. Much of Poole’s prosperity is due to the china-clay trade, carried on by the vessels of thatport, which receive it from barges crossing the harbour. It was early used for tobacco-pipes, and probably those of Sir Walter Raleigh’s first experiments were made from the clay found here. So far back as 1760 the export of Purbeck china-clay had reached ten thousand tons annually. It has now risen to about sixty thousand.
This northern portion of the Isle of Purbeck is indeed of altogether different character from the rugged stony southern half, beyond Corfe. It is low-lying and heathy, and the roads are a complete change from the blinding whiteness characterising those of PurbeckPetræa, as it may be named. Here, mended with ironstone, they are of a ruddy colour.
Leaving the clay-cutters and their terraced diggings behind, we come, past the paltry hamlet of Stoborough, within sight of Wareham, entered across a long causeway over the Frome marshes and over an ancient Gothic bridge spanning the Frome itself. Ahead is seen the tower of St. Mary’s, one of the only two churches remaining of the original eight. Five of the others have been swept away, and the sixth is converted into a school. Wareham, it will be guessed, is not a mushroom place of yesterday, but has a past and has seen many changes.
Wareham, “the oldest arnshuntest place in Do’set, where ye turn up housen underneath yer ’tater-patch,” as described to the present historian by a rustic, who might have been the original of Haymoss, inTwo on a Tower, is indeed of a hoary antiquity, and bears many evidences of that attractive fact. Its chief streets, named after the cardinal points of the compass, do not perhaps afford the bestevidences of that age, for they are broad and straight and lined with houses which, if not all Georgian, are so largely in that style that they influence the general character of the thoroughfares and give them an air of the eighteenth century. For this there is an excellent reason, found in the almost complete destruction by fire of Wareham, on July 25th, 1762.
To the ordinary traveller—and certainly to the commercial traveller—without a bias for history and antiquities, it is the dullest town in Wessex. Not decayed, like Cerne Abbas, its streets are yet void and still, and how it, under this constant solitude and somnolence, manages to retain its prosperity and cheerfulness is an unsolved riddle.
Wareham, like Dorchester, was enclosed within earthworks; but while Dorchester has overleaped those ancient bounds, Wareham has shrunk within them, and one who, climbing those stupendous fortifications, looks down upon the little town, sees gardens and orchards, pigsties and cowsheds plentifully intermingled with the streets, on the spot where other and vanished streets once stood. That “once,” however, was so long ago that the effect of decay, once produced, no longer obtains, and the mind dwells, not so greatly upon the fallen fortunes evident in such things, as upon the luxuriance of the gardens themselves and the prettiness of the picture they produce, intermingled with the houses.
Wareham—“Anglebury” Mr. Hardy calls it—is, or was when the latest census returns were published, a town of two thousand and three inhabitants.
Approach to Wareham
Since then it has certainly not increased, and most likely has lost more than those odd three, thus coming within the fatal definition given somewhere, by some one, of a village.
The Walls of Wareham
Things are in this way come to a parlous state, for this is the latest of a good many modern strokes. One, which hurt its pride not a little, was when, in the redistribution of Parliamentary seats, it lost its representation and became merged in a county division. Another—but why enumerate these undeserved whips and scorns? In one respect Wareham keeps an urban character. It has two inns—the “Black Bear” and the “Red Lion”—that call themselves hotels, and a score or so of minor houses where, if you cannot obtain a desirable “cup of genuine,” why, “’tis a sad thing and an oncivilised?”
It was doubtless its ancient story which induced Mr. Hardy to style Wareham “Anglebury,” for that story is greatly concerned with the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Dorset and the fortunes of the Kingdom of Wessex. Conveniently near the sea, within the innermost recesses of Poole Harbour, and yet removed from the rage and havoc of the outer elements, it lies on the half-mile-broad tongue of land separating the two rivers Piddle and Frome, at the distance of little over a mile from where they debouch upon the landlocked harbour. In a nook such as this you might think a town would have been secure, and that was the hope of those who founded it here. But, to render assurance doubly sure, those original town-builders—who were probably much earlier than the invading Saxons and are thought to have been some British tribe—heaped up and dug out those famous “walls of Wareham,” which surround the town to this day, and are not walls in the common acceptation ofthe term, but ditches so deeply delved, and mounds so steeply piled that they are in some places little more scalable than a forthright, plumb up and down, wall of brick or masonry would be, and with an “angle of repose” sufficiently acute to astonish any modern railway engineer.
Wareham, lying within these cyclopean earthworks, was a place of strength, but it was its very strength that brought about the bloody tangle of its long history. Strong defences require determined attacks. That history only opens with some clearness at the time of the Saxon occupation, when the piratical Danes were beginning to harry the coast, but it continues with accounts of fierce assaults and merciless forays, repeated until the time when Guthrum, the Danish chief, was opposed by only a few dispirited defenders. InA.D.876 these Northmen captured the place, but were besieged by Alfred the Great, who starved them out. Some Saxon confidence then returned, but the old miseries were repeated when Canute, not yet the pious Canute of his last years, sailed up the Frome and not only destroyed this already oft-destroyed town, but pillaged the greater part of Wessex.
Little wonder, then, that Wareham was described as a desolated place when the Conqueror came; but it was made to hold up its head once more, and the two mints it had owned in the time of Saxon Athelstan were re-established. The castle, whose name alone survives, in that of Castle Hill, was then built, and, in the added strength it gave, was the source of many troubles soon to come. It was surprised and seized for the Empress Maud in 1138, but captured and burnt by Stephen four yearslater, in the absence of its governor, the Earl of Gloucester, who returning, recaptured the town after a three-weeks’ siege. At length the treaty of peace and tolerance between Stephen and Maud gave the townsfolk—those few of them who had been courageous enough to remain, and fortunate enough to survive—an opportunity of creeping out of the cellars, and of looking around and reviewing their position. “Hope springs eternal,” and these remnants of the Wareham folk were in some measure justified of their faith, for it was not until another half-century had passed that the town was again besieged and taken. That event was anincident in the contention between King John and his Barons, and a feature of it was the destruction of the castle, never afterwards rebuilt.
Wareham
That destruction was one of the greatest blessings that could possibly have befallen this ancient cockpit of racial and personal warfares, for it rendered Wareham a place of little account in the calculations of mediæval partisans; and then it grew and prospered, unmolested, until the Civil War of Crown and Parliament, when old times came again, in the bewildering circumstances of its being garrisoned for the Parliament against the inclination of the loyal townsfolk, besieged and half ruined and then captured by the Royalists, obliged to batter the property of their friends before they could recover it, and then stormed and surrendered and regained and evacuated until the Muse of History herself ceases to keep tally. Few people looked on: most took an active part, and the rector himself, “a stiff-necked and stubborn scorner of good things,” was wounded in the head and imprisoned nineteen times. The obvious criticism here is that they must have been short sentences. The Parliamentary commander, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was for punishing the “dreadful malignancy shown towards the cause of righteousness” by the Wareham people, and advised that the place be “plucked down and made no town”; but this course was not adopted.
Apart from battles and sieges, Wareham has witnessed many horrid deeds. In that castle whose site alone remains, Robert de Belesme was starved to death in 1114, and on those walls an unfortunate and indiscreet hermit and prophet, one Peter ofPomfret, who had prophesied that the King should lose his crown, was hanged and quartered in 1213, after having been fed, in the manner of the prophet Micaiah, with the bread of affliction, and the water of affliction, in the gruesome dungeons of Corfe. For King John, the Ahab of our history, had a way of his own with seers of visions and prophesiers of disaster; and his way, it will be allowed, very effectually discouraged prying into futurity.
Here also, at a corner of these grassy ramparts still called “Bloody Bank,” three poor fellows who had taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion were hanged, portions of their bodies being afterwards exposed, with ghastly barbarity, in different parts of the town.
Following the long broad street from where the town is entered across the Frome, the “Black Bear” is passed, prominent with its porch and the great chained effigy of the black bear himself, sitting on his rump upon the roof of it. Passing the Church of St. Martin, perched boldly on a terrace above the road, its tower bearing a quaintly lettered tablet, handing the churchwardens of 1712 down to posterity, we now come to the northern extremity of Wareham, and descending to the banks of the Piddle, may, looking backwards, see those old defences, the so-styled “walls,” heaped up with magnificent emphasis.
They envisage the ancient drama of the contested town, and although it is a drama long since played, and the curtain rung down upon the last act, two hundred and fifty years ago, this scenery of it can still eloquently recall its dragonadoes and blood-boltered episodes.